Global change drivers of land-use/cover change (LUCC) like population dynamics, economic development, and climate change are increasingly important to local sustainability studies, and can only be properly analyzed at fine-scales that capture local biophysical and socio-economic conditions. When sufficiently widespread, local feedback to stresses originating from global drivers can have regional, national, and even global impacts. A multiscale, global-to-local-to-global (GLG) framework is thus needed for comprehensive analyses of LUCC and leakage. The number of GLG-LUCC studies has grown substantially over the past years, but no reviews of this literature and their contributions have been completed so far. In fact, the largest body of literature pertains to global-to-local impacts exclusively, whereas research on local feedback to regional, national, and global spheres remain scarce, and are almost solely undertaken within large modeling institutes. As such, those are rarely readily accessible for modification and extension by outside contributors. This review of the recent GLG-LUCC studies calls for more open-source modeling and availability of data, arguing that the latter is the real constraint to more widespread analyses of GLG-LUCC impacts. Progress in this field will require contributions from hundreds of researchers around the world and from a wide variety of disciplines.
Climate change by its very nature epitomizes the necessity and usefulness of the global-to-local-to-global (GLG) paradigm. It is a global problem with the potential to affect local communities and ecosystems. Accumulation of local impacts and responses to climate change feeds back to regional and global systems creating feedback loops. Understanding these complex impacts and interactions is key to developing more resilient adaptation measures and designing more efficient mitigation policies. To this date, however, GLG interactions have not yet been an integrative part of the decision-support toolkit. The typical approach either traces the impacts of global action on the local level or estimates the implications of local policies at the global scale. The first approach misses cumulative feedback of local responses that can have regional, national or global impacts. In the second case, one undermines a global context of the local actions most likely misrepresenting the complexity of the local decision-making process. Potential interactions across scales are further complicated by the presence of cascading impacts, connected risks and tipping points. Capturing these dimensions is not always a straightforward task and often requires a departure from conventional modeling approaches. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art approaches to modeling GLG interactions in the context of climate change. We further identify key limitations that drive the lack of GLG coupling cases and discuss what could be done to address these challenges.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1855937
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10526814
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environmental Research Letters
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1748-9326
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 053002
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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